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What we talk about when we talk about biolinguistics

  • Pedro Tiago Martins EMAIL logo and Cedric Boeckx
Published/Copyright: August 27, 2016
Linguistics Vanguard
From the journal Linguistics Vanguard Volume 2 Issue 1

Abstract

The study of the biological foundations of language is sometimes called biolinguistics. This particular term finds its historical origins in the 1950s, and for various reasons it has also gained considerable traction in recent years. While its increasing use apparently signals an equally increasing interest in biology, apart from a few exceptions not much is added to and beyond standard linguistic theorizing by those linguists who use it, resulting in a complex and confusing literature. This state of affairs has led, on the one hand, to the perpetuation of proposals that are hard to relate to the biological literature and, on the other, to ill-placed criticism on the progress and even the very legitimacy of a biologically-informed study of language. By reviewing different ways in which research under the biolinguistics label has been carried out, as well as some common criticisms, we hope to dispel some misconceptions about what constitutes a biolinguistic approach, as well as point out what we contend is real progress in the study of the biological bases and evolution of the human language faculty, to which the term is better and rightly applied.

Keywords: biolinguistics; generative grammar; interdisciplinarity; language faculty

Funding statement: Preparation of this work was supported by funds from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (grants FFI2013-43823-P and FFI2014-61888-EXP), as well as funds from a Marie Curie International Reintegration Grant from the European Union (PIRG-GA-2009-256413), research funds from the Fundació Bosch i Gimpera, and from the Generalitat de Catalunya (2014-SGR-200).

Acknowledgments

We thank audiences at several conferences where we have presented our work in recent years. This paper is motivated by their questions, comments and criticism. We acknowledge as well valuable suggestions by an anonymous reviewer and an editor of Linguistics Vanguard.

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Received: 2016-4-5
Accepted: 2016-7-26
Published Online: 2016-8-27
Published in Print: 2016-12-1

© 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2016-0007
Keywords for this article
biolinguistics; generative grammar; interdisciplinarity; language faculty

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Editorial
  2. Editorial
  3. Phonetics & Phonology
  4. Phonotactic c(l)ues to Bantu noun class disambiguation
  5. Articulatory correlates of metrical structure: Studying jaw displacement patterns
  6. Language Acquisition & Language Learning
  7. Statistics and semantics in the acquisition of Spanish word order: Testing two accounts of the retreat from locative overgeneralization errors
  8. Historical Linguistics
  9. Tangut, Gyalrongic, Kiranti and the nature of person indexation in Sino-Tibetan/Trans-Himalayan
  10. Usage-based perspectives on diachronic morphology: A mixed-methods approach towards English ing-nominals
  11. Morphology & Syntax
  12. What we talk about when we talk about biolinguistics
  13. Structure vs. use in heritage language
  14. Sociolinguistics & Anthropological Linguistics
  15. An evaluation of noise on LPC-based vowel formant estimates: Implications for sociolinguistic data collection
  16. Cognitive Linguistics
  17. Fluid construction grammar as a biological system
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